Don't you think THIS planet should be fixed before terraforming others?

The movie bothered me for the same reason. Its point seems to be that we don't have to worry, because humans will find a way even after the earth becomes unlivable.

Personally I'd prefer the first terraforming experiments weren't tried on the only planet we've found so far that supports life as we know it.

If humans were removed from the equation, earth would certainly have a lot more shrubbery pretty quickly.

As long as we could somehow colour co-ordinate the flowering continents before we left, the whole ensemble could work rather well.

Sure, but for better or worse, there's a huge one already underway.

Calling what we're doing to this planet an 'experiment' is way too kind.

If only there were a control group so we could all move there.

i watched a ted talk recently where a guy talked about a game I've played - find one interesting fact you didn't know in an encyclopedia and then use some tenuous link from that to another entry and so on.

Anyway one of his interesting facts was that if you shrank the earth down to billiard ball size it would be smoother than a billiard ball. Life on earth is incredibly 'thin skinned'.

You see, the reason they would need to terraform a planet is because of what we are doing to Earth. If our home-planet were to be polluted to a point where life couldnt exist there, then we could just move somewhere else and learn from our mistakes. We were probably meant to leave Earth anyway. Or it is like on "Intersteller." We aren't meant to leave Earth, but we are meant to do something even greater. It will doubtedly be becoming fifth-dimensional beings, but something great.

But if we could terraform another planet, why couldn't we just as easily fix Earth?

There's no need to learn from your mistakes if you just keep moving to other planets. For instance, if you ruin engines and clutches in cars but your dad keeps buying you new ones at the first sign of trouble, what incentive would you have for learning about how to better care for the cars so they wouldn't fail so soon? However in Cuba once they knew they couldn't get any more American cars, they learned to keep theirs running decade after decade.